Nouveau Hip Art Meets Feisty Grunge in St. Petersburg

The Alexander Kondratyev show at the scrappy Pushkinskaya 10, opened by dissidents in the Soviet Union’s final years.Credit
Katya Lebedev

Contemporary art in St. Petersburg is a split scene, not surprising for a city that has had two names and two identities over the last century. Anyone wanting to view late-20th century avant-garde or today’s cutting-edge works gets to choose between near opposites: the sleek lines of hip new spaces or the defiant scruffiness of the dissident movement at the close of the Communist era.

In the last year, two privately sponsored modern art museums — the Erarta Museum and Galleries of Contemporary Art, and the New Museum — have opened here, both on Vasilyevsky Island about a 20-minute walk from each other. That may not be close enough for the kind of buzz that rises from the densely packed gallery districts of New York, London or Moscow, but it is helping to turn Russia’s second-largest city and former imperial capital into a contemporary art contender.

Well-lighted and accessible, these two museums are a world away from Pushkinskaya 10, a historic warren of galleries spread around the Museum of Nonconformist Art, founded 20 years ago by artists who occupied the building and never left, with little evidence of renovation to mark their stay.

There, a distinctly bohemian spirit lingers in the disheveled courtyard, with its broken pavement, whimsical graffiti and a memorial to John Lennon, up the dank stairwells decorated with threatening black metal sculptures, past mysterious unmarked doors, which actually do have galleries behind them — if you come at the right time.

For instance, on Saturdays, from 3 to 7 p.m., you can visit the “Bridge Over Styx” gallery, dedicated to haunting collages by the renowned artist Vadim Voinov, who has turned his collection of abandoned objects found in old buildings into evocative echoes of Soviet history when the city was Leningrad.

Navigating Pushkinskaya 10 is not easy, particularly in early spring, when mounds of dirty snow rise above puddles of mud, and in the mornings, when just about everything is closed — including the Fish Fabrique Nouvelle cafe, a low-key artists hangout in the middle of the courtyard.

If, for instance, you are looking for current exhibitions by Alexander Kondratyev in the Big Hall or by Natalya Shalina in the Little Hall (both of which run until April 17), just ask: Don’t bother looking for signs in any language. The Shalina show is mostly of brightly colored illustrations for a book put together by group of St. Petersburg actors, while the works by Mr. Kondratyev, an heir of the Russian late-20th century avant-garde, span several decades and range from scenes of Central Asia to more recent paintings of pigs and wolves.

It would be wrong to write off Pushkinskaya 10 (“desyat” in Russian) as an outdated relic. Drop by when an exhibition is opening, and you will find it jam-packed with people — old and young, stylish and frumpy, curious and loyal.

There’s no mistaking where you are: this is Russia, where many bridle at the idea that art can be driven by market forces. Directors of the Nonconformist art museum pride themselves on their nongovernment, noncommercial status, and wear both descriptions like a badge of honor.

That said, there are some who fear that Pushkinskaya 10 will soon slide out history’s back door. “This place represents perestroika,” said Konsantin Ilyshevsky, a exhibition designer at the Hermitage museum, referring to the last phase of Soviet history in a speech he gave at the opening of the Kondratyev exhibition. “These artists are the children of their time, and in 10 years, this won't be here.”

At Erarta, which opened in September, the challenge is to bring generations of artists together from across the country, rather than just from Moscow, which dominates the Russian contemporary art scene like a giant octopus. The museum — which has 2,000 works by more than 140 artists — and its sister gallery share a five-story Soviet-era building, whose last occupant was the Synthetic Rubber Research Institute.

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A three-year renovation has erased any traces of Communist dreariness. White walls, good lighting, wide staircases, video installations and a simple but elegant cafe make this a familiar landscape for international visitors. The ticket price to the museum — open everyday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. except Wednesdays — is 300 rubles, or about $10. Access to the gallery, now showing an exhibition of Vladimir Migachev’s real and imagined Russian landscapes, is free. In its first six months, the museum drew more than 38,000 visitors.

Given the depth and wealth of St. Petersburg’s cultural heritage, it was high time for “its contemporary component to become as valuable and elaborated as its classical one,” said Mikhail Ovchinnikov, the museum’s director.

“We are searching for pieces made by the type of artists who would be successors of the spirit of Russia’s intelligentsia, people involved in self-discovery and a search for national roots,” he added in an e-mail.

He too scorns the role of financial speculation in the art market — even though the Erarta gallery sells works. Still, he insists St. Petersburg art is distinguished by “its independence from commercialization,” a contrast to the Moscow art scene.

The New Museum — Novy Muzei in Russian — which opened last June on two floors of a renovated 19th-century building, is on a more modest scale, with some 300 paintings. The museum, which is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, charges 200 rubles for admission.

Its founder, Aslan Chekhoyev, a local businessmen and a collector, set out to showcase artists from the last half of the 20th century — many of them from Moscow — in St. Petersburg where, in his view, their works and legacy has been largely ignored by state museums.

They include “The Three Mannequins” by Boris Turetsky, a painting recently found abandoned in a rundown Moscow apartment, and the outsize piece “Yalta Conference: Judgement of Paris” by the unstoppable Russian-born duo Komar and Melamid, showing Stalin, Roosevelt and Hitler in the nude.

Such art doesn’t necessarily draw huge crowds in this city, where money, glitter and celebrity status don’t have the same draw as in Moscow. But there is a growing recognition that St. Petersburg, still struggling to recapture its bygone elegance, can ill afford to sit out contemporary trends in art.

“You can't impress Petersburg with museums,” Vadim Znamenov, president of the state Peterhof Museum, the giant palace built by Peter the Great, said at the opening of the Erarta Museum. “But contemporary art remains a mystery for many. And this museum will help unlock it.”